Imaging systems in the field of the invention generally rely on the basic principle of triangulation. The most basic implementation of this principle involves images from only two locations where the effective aperture for the pixels in the two images is small relative to the separation between the two points. (Herein the effective aperture is the portion of the physical aperture that contains all of the rays that reach the active part of the sensing pixel.) This implementation with two images from different locations is called stereo vision and is often implemented with two separate cameras and lenses. To perform triangulation, a correspondence problem for the images from different locations needs to be solved to determine the location of an object in both images. The location within the images determines a direction from the positions of the cameras to the object. The intersection of these two lines determines the object's location in a scene, which gives the depth of the object.
Depth estimates obtained using such techniques are useful for a variety of applications. For example, depth estimates may be used to obtain a three dimensional map of a site or area of interest, such as a construction site, a room, an anatomical region, and/or the like. Depth estimates may also be used to form three dimensional models of objects for applications such as three-dimensional printing or for archival purposes. Depth estimates may also be used by cinematographers, photographers, or other artists to form three-dimensional images or video.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to develop improved imaging systems and methods for estimating the depth of an object.